Transferring Whose Knowledge? Exchanging Whose Best Practices?:
On Knowing About Indigenous Knowledge and Aboriginal Suicide
Michael J. Chandler, University of British Columbia
Christopher E. Lalonde, University of Victoria
Addresses for correspondence:
Michael J. Chandler
Department of Psychology
University of British Columbia
2136 West Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4
[email protected]
Christopher E. Lalonde
Department of Psychology
University of Victoria
PO Box 3050 STN CSC
Victoria, BC V8W 3P5
[email protected]
To appear in: D. Beavan & J. White (Eds.). Aboriginal Policy Research. London, ON: Althouse Press.
Over the better part of a decade we have
been hard at work re-fashioning a still earlier
decade’s worth of work on identity development
and youth suicide in order to better fit these
efforts to the special circumstances of
Canadian Aboriginal youth—an ongoing effort
aimed at explaining two deeply puzzling
matters. One of these concerns the heartbreakingly high rate of suicide widely known to
mark and often stigmatize aboriginal youth; an
overall suicide rate that is reported to be higher
than that of any culturally identifiable group in
the world (Kirmayer, 1994). The second of
these known facts of the matter (owed largely to
our own research) is that the rate of aboriginal
youth suicide varies dramatically from one
community to another. As our research in
British Columbia clearly demonstrates, more
than 90% of aboriginal youth suicides occur in
only 10% of the bands, with some communities
suffering rates as much as 800 times the
national average, while more than half of the
province’s 200 First Nations bands have not
experienced a single youth suicide in the almost
15 years for which such figures are available.
What obviously needs explaining in the face of
such disparities—what inquiring minds most
want to know—is what is different about those
communities without such suicides, and those
in which youth suicide occurs in epidemic
proportion?
Since 1998 we have provided more than a
half dozen journal articles and book chapters
(Chandler, 2000; Chandler, 2001; Chandler, &
Lalonde, 1998; Chandler, & Lalonde, 2000a,
2000b; Chandler, Lalonde, & Sokol, 2000;
Chandler, & Sokol, in press; Lalonde, 2003), as
well as a book length monograph (Chandler,
Lalonde, Sokol, & Hallett, in press)—a total of
more than 300 published pages—all detailing
what we take to be our best interim answers to
these two troubling questions. In particular, we
have shown: a) not only where in the province
aboriginal suicides occur and re-occur, and
where they are absent; but also b) what
community level risk and protective factors
especially distinguish such have- and have-not
bands. More significantly, we have also
demonstrated that bands that are well on their
way toward preserving or rehabilitating their
threatened cultures, and that have met with
measurable success in recovering community
control over their civic lives (i.e., that, in addition
to having taken concrete steps to preserve their
cultural past, have achieved a measure of selfgovernment, have effectively militated for
Chandler & Lalonde: Indigenous Knowledge
aboriginal title to traditional lands, and have
gained a measure of control over their own
health, education, child protection, and jural
systems) suffer no youth suicides, while those
who fail to meet all or most of these standards
of self-determination have youth suicide rates
more than 150 times the national average. In
addition, we have individually interviewed and
assessed more than 200 aboriginal youth and
their culturally mainstream peers, all in an effort
to understand individual counterparts of
cultural-level continuity, and to determine the
different ways in which developing youth from
both of these cultures struggle to understand
their own personal persistence in the face of
inevitable change. Here our findings make it
plain that, in contrast to their more “essentialist”
majority culture counterparts (who root their
beliefs about self-continuity in the persistence
of particular self-attributes), First Nations youth
overwhelmingly elect to warrant their own
diachronic sense of temporal connectedness by
running a narrative thread through the
distinctive time-slices of their own and others’
lives.
While it did not take all of our several
hundred published pages to say only this much
(e.g., we have chosen to leave out of this
current account a mountain of detail about what
does and does not especially distinguish
suicide prone and suicide free individuals and
whole communities), all of what has previously
been said elsewhere hardly needs repeating
here. Rather, the few short pages of this
chapter are given over to an attempt to highlight
what we take to be some of the potential action
or policy implications of our work. To do this, of
course, is to move out on very thin ice. If we are
to take our own subsequent message about
community control seriously, it is hardly our
place, as uninvited guests, to attempt to instruct
aboriginal communities about how they ought to
behave. If anything, we are even less expert
still about the world of government policy
practices. Still, with a certain appropriate dose
of fear and trembling, we are persuaded, and
so emboldened, to make and elaborate upon
two strong points that, given the evidence in
hand, it would be irresponsible not to
emphasize.
One of these talking points arises as a
consequence of the extreme variability we have
documented in the rates of youth suicide as
2
they differentially occur in aboriginal bands
across the province of BC. Something
important––maybe several important
things––we believe, turn on this new evidence,
both for the communities described, and for
those agencies of provincial and federal
government charged with addressing the
special health concerns of these aboriginal
youth.
Second, we believe our findings say
something of actionable importance about what
can and should be done to better address the
problem of aboriginal youth suicide. At least to
date, our own findings themselves remain, of
course, much too superficial, and too thin on
the ground, to be taken as a concrete guide for
solving anyone’s problems, least of all the
dense and layered problems surrounding the
task of persuading aboriginal youth that we
have allowed them a life worth living. What is
not in serious doubt, however, is that our
research makes plain a large and poorly
appreciated source of real cultural knowledge
about how such problems not only might be, but
already have been solved to some important
degree of satisfaction. Clearly contained in the
finding that more than half of BC’s aboriginal
communities have not suffered a single youth
suicide in the last 15 years (a suicide rate
remarkably lower than that of the general
population) is, for example, the evident fact that
real knowledge about how to address this
problem is already well sedimented within these
aboriginal communities themselves. What is
less clear, and what we mean to introduce as a
topic for discussion in the second and final part
of this chapter, is how this especially
encouraging fact can be preserved and shared
more widely among aboriginal communities,
and how governments can best nurture and
conserve this overlooked and underdeveloped
resource of indigenous knowledge.
What we will undertake to argue is that our
new evidence in hand speaks strongly in favor
of a different vision of the much heralded
notions of “knowledge transfer,” and the
“exchange of best practices”––a vision that
sees relevant knowledge and practices as also
moving “laterally” from community to
community, rather than only from Ottawa or
some provincial capital “down” to the level of
aboriginal communities.
Chandler & Lalonde: Indigenous Knowledge
No one, of course, is in serious doubt about
the economies and pragmatics of scale
responsible for the existence of governmental
policies and practices aimed at the whole of
Canada’s aboriginal population. What is
perhaps surprising is that, all too often, social
scientists and health professionals, who are at
least potentially free of such bureaucratic
necessities, also appear to endorse a similar
“monolithic” view (Duran & Duran, 1995, p.
107), by mistakenly imagining that it is possible
to capture the diversity of a whole province’s or
country’s aboriginal life in a single (often
statistical) gaze. Such attempts at bulk
processing are, as it turns out, as common as
clay. Consequently, no one is any longer
shocked, for example, when told, on “good
authority,” that aboriginal people at large have
an elevated suicide rate, or experience
problems with alcohol, or too commonly drop
out of school. Why shock (and, if not, anger or
outrage) is the more appropriate response to
such generic claims is, of course, because such
totalizing commentary obscures the evident fact
that to talk of “the” aboriginal is to reinscribe
what Berkhoffer (1978) calls an arbitrary
category, and a European invention, that exists
only as a kind of recoiling from the “other”
(Said, 1978)—a construction that serves
primarily to justify and reinforce a dangerous
cultural stereotype.
The real truth is, rather, that the aboriginal
population of Canada and the United States is
remarkably diverse, accounting for what
Hodgkenson (1990) reports to be upwards of
50% of the actual cultural diversity of the whole
continent. In BC, where our own research was
conducted, there are, for example, more than
200 contemporary bands, that collectively
speak 14 mutually un-interpretable languages,
occupy a territory bigger than Western Europe,
live in sharply different ecological niches and
spiritual worlds, and have radically different
histories, both with the now majority culture and
with one another.
As new and better evidence begins to
accumulate––evidence such as our own––it
becomes increasingly apparent that blanket
statements created by simply averaging across
all of the real cultural diversity that does exist
automatically result in what can, most
charitably, be called “actuarial fictions.” Our
own ongoing work on aboriginal youth suicide
provides a clear case in point. While it is true
that the overall provincial rate of youth suicide
is somewhere between 5 and 20 times that of
the general population, this summary statistic
actually tells us nothing about any particular
group or community. This is not to say that
either we, or others who report similar findings
(e.g., Malchy, Enns, Young, & Cox, 1997),
somehow got our sums wrong. Rather, what is
lost is the fact that youth suicide rates vary
radically along almost any dimension one might
choose. Figures 1 and 2, for example, display
the rates of youth suicide for both BC’s
aboriginal and non-aboriginal populations, first
by Health Region and then Census District.
What is immediately evident from a quick
inspection of these figures is that, in
comparison to the general population, the
suicide rates on display for aboriginal youth
present a wildly saw-toothed picture. Of course,
some of this variability can be laid off to the fact
that suicides are rare, even when epidemic, and
so are subject to fluctuations due to small
sample sizes. Perhaps more meaningful,
because they are about groups with something
closer to human meaning, are comparable
suicide rates by aboriginal band and tribal
council (see Figures 3 & 4). Here, as
summarized earlier, it is evident that many,
actually most, aboriginal communities have no
youth suicides in the 14 year reporting window,
while others have rates a hundred or more
times the national or provincial average.
Figure 1: Youth Suicide Rate by Health
Region (BC, 1987-1992)
100
Suicides per 100,000
Part One: The Myth of the Monolithic
Indigene
3
80
Native
Non-Native
60
40
20
0
Health Region (names removed)
Chandler & Lalonde: Indigenous Knowledge
Figure 2: Youth Suicide by Census
District (BC, 1987-1992)
Suicides per 100,000
1000
800
Native
Non-Native
600
400
200
0
Census District (names removed)
Suicides per 100,000
Figure 3: Youth Suicide by Band
(BC, 1993-2000)
1000
800
600
400
200
0
Band (names removed)
Suicides per 100,000
Figure 4: Youth Suicide by Tribal
Council (BC, 1993-2000)
1000
800
600
400
200
0
Tribal Council (names removed)
Although similar statistics are becoming
available concerning other problems of health
and well-being (we, for example, now have
similar findings concerning school drop-out
rates by band), what we hope you will take from
our working example is the utter pointlessness
and defamatory consequences of envisioning
some generic, one-size-fits-all, made in
Ottawa/Victoria solution to the aboriginal
suicide problem. The real truth is that half of the
bands in BC—the bands that have no reported
youth suicides–scarcely need instruction from
the majority culture, which can boast no such
4
claim. Others, tragically, suffer alarmingly high
youth suicide rates and, if we just knew from
what quarter help might be forthcoming, they
need and very likely want all of the help they
can get.
Perhaps the oldest aphorism in medicine is
“no differential treatment without differential
diagnosis.” The point we mean to drive home
concerns a similar insight about cultural
diversity. There is no monolithic indigene, no
“other,” and no such thing as the suicidal
aboriginal. The pretense that there is amounts
to just a way of running scared before diversity.
Part Two: Indigenous Knowledge,
Knowledge Transfer, and The Exchange of
Best Practices
Talk of “knowledge transfer” and the
“exchange of best practices” has become, of
late, very much the talk of the town. When you
hear it, take special note of who is ordinarily
imagined to be on the giving and receiving ends
of whatever exchange or transfer is had in
mind. Almost invariably, the persons imagined
to be taking up a position at either end of this
knowledge conduit are both social scientists or
health professionals, and the flow of information
is almost always “down-hill,” from positions of
higher to lower professional status.
Occasionally, communities or community
leaders are the intended targets of such new
information, but the prospect that useful
knowledge might flow “up-hill,” or even laterally
from community to community is ordinarily
excluded from the realm of conceivable or
legitimate possibilities.
The presumption that all legitimate forms of
knowledge transfer follow a one-way street is,
of course, especially unfortunate for a long list
of reasons. Not the least of these is the fact
that, in the case of aboriginal communities and
in the instance of youth suicide, there are very
good reasons to believe that some of the bands
in question are firmly in possession of
knowledge and practices that could be of
enormous potential help to others, if these
could be exchanged somehow, or transferred
from one community group to another. Should it
prove possible to “lateral” such best practices
back and forth among aboriginal communities,
otherwise seemingly intractable problems might
be solved. What we typically have instead is a
top-down and insular arrangement that
Chandler & Lalonde: Indigenous Knowledge
illegitimizes and disqualifies the knowledge
forms sedimented within indigenous
communities––an arrangement that has little to
recommend it. It is, in addition to being frankly
unpopular and disrespectful, both strategically
unwise, and (if contemporary practitioners of
post-colonial theory and colonial discourse
analysis are to be believed) it represents a form
of “epistemic violence’ (Spivak, 1985, p. 126)
that is inherently hostile to, and serves to
confirm the positional inferiority of, aboriginal
culture. All of these risks taken singularly or in
combination run so strongly against the
contemporary best interests of both
governments and their constituencies that the
apparent impulse to continue running them
deserves closer interrogation.
First, it should hardly come as a surprise, or
seem unwarranted, that Canada’s aboriginal
people are often suspicious or mistrustful of
problem definitions and solution strategies that
are invented in Ottawa or even in New York
City. However ignorant and beside the point the
abstract theorizing of “the academy” may
sometimes seem to those who work inside it, no
one will be surprised to learn that such imported
ways of thinking appear even more outré when
lobbed into some aboriginal community from
distant capitals, or parachuted down from some
ivory tower. There is, however, more to their
problem than simple lack of real expertise.
Such educative or “civilizing missions” (Gandhi,
1998 , p. 16)—missions in which native
“superstitions” are read as naturally “childish”
and counter-posed against supposedly “real”
scientific knowledge—automatically cast those
representing the dominant culture in the role of
authorities, while quietly condemning aboriginal
people to a derivative and subjugated epistemic
existence. Knowledge invented elsewhere and
rudely transplanted root and branch in someone
else’s back yard is often and rightly understood
to be a weapon wielded by those who have it
against those who must suffer it, a form of
conquest and occupation of minds (Nandy,
1983) that serves to further colonize the life
worlds of native people (Duran & Duran, 1995),
and to marginalize indigenous voices.
Second, to imagine that knowledges and
problem solving strategies evolved in native
communities over hundreds of years have no
legitimate pride of place at the transfer table of
contemporary knowledge production and
5
exchange is not only hostile, but makes poor
economic and strategic sense. Perhaps there
was a time in which the marginalization and
intellectual exclusion of traditional practices as
legitimate knowledge forms actually served
existing purposes of economic domination and
the generation of profit, but that was then and
hardly now. Instead, ongoing, trickle-down
strategies that locate all useful knowledge
within the academy now appear to be fighting a
losing battle in which current efforts at capacity
building are repeatedly overtaken by a rising
tide of building social problems.
What all of this would appear to suggest is
that, in the place of whatever lingering residue
of neo-colonialist thought that, as Fanon (1965)
put it, “wants everything to come from it” (p. 63),
the usual practice of canceling or negating or
emptying traditional knowledge forms of
meaning needs to be cashed out as no longer
profitable. In the place of the existing hierarchy
of knowledges that equate “otherness” with
ignorance, it would now appear to be in the
interest of the academy, and society at large, to
newly entertain the idea that indigenous
knowledge might be real knowledge, and that
the best ways of helping those in need of help
may be to help them help themselves.
Steps taken in this proposed direction would
need to begin, as we have taken pains to
emphasize in Part One, with serious efforts to
determine how various social and health
problems are distributed across the diverse
whole of the aboriginal population. This would,
as Duran and Duran (1995, p. 106) point out,
have the important advantage of avoiding the
obvious waste of spending large sums of talent
and money on the business of preventing things
that seem not to happen, or that have already
happened. More to the present point, such a
careful assay of community successes and
failures would make it possible to identify and
hopefully enlist a wide variety of unrecognized
and underutilized cultural resources. As can be
seen in our own efforts to identify aboriginal
communities that appear to have already solved
their own problem of youth suicide, doing just
this would go an important distance toward
determining what really counts as “best
practices” that are worthy of “exchange,” and of
identifying, as potential partners in the task of
knowledge transfer, whole communities whose
indigenous knowledge is less entangled in a
Chandler & Lalonde: Indigenous Knowledge
6
history of misused power and authority
(Foucault, 1980) than is knowledge made in
New York City.
Figure 5: Suicide Rates by Community
Factors
Can The Subaltern Speak?
Child Protection
If, as our own data concerning band-level
variability in aboriginal youth suicide rates
illustrates, some communities are evidently in
possession of forms of knowledge and
practices that are currently unknown or
unavailable to others, two general sorts of
questions immediately arise. One of these asks
“what, exactly, are those knowledges and
practices, and who knows about them?” The
other has to do with just how deep and
declarative such knowledge is, and whether
and how it might be shared.
Women in Govt
Police/Fire
Cultural Facil
Health
Education
Land Claims
Self Govt
0
10
20
30
40
50
Suicides per 100,000
Figure 6: Suicide Rate by Number of
Factors Present (BC, 1993-2000)
Suicides per 100,000
The first of these open questions is relatively
the more easily settled through the application
of simple, if procedurally involved,
epidemiological procedures. Again, in the case
of our own data, it is clear enough that those
communities that are all or largely free of youth
suicide must know and do things that are
unknown or left undone by communities where
youth suicide is epidemic. Similarly, there is no
special mystery in knowing how to go about
sorting through available community level
descriptors in an effort to distinguish some of
what sets more and less successful
communities apart. The trick, if there is one, is
in having access to useful measures that are
common to all of the relevant communities and
that capture important differences between
them, and in having some workable theory that
can guide one in distinguishing potentially
relevant descriptors from the chaff that is
otherwise available. In our own case an
elaborated developmental theory of individual
and community level identity formation allowed
us to zero in on a small handful of available
“proxy” variables that served to differentially
mark those communities that were more or less
successful in reconstructing their cultural past,
and gaining future control over their evolving
civic lives. Figure 5 reproduces a list of 8 such
variables already shown to distinguish
aboriginal bands with relatively low and high
youth suicide rates––variables that, when taken
in combination (see Figure 6) are highly
predictive of which communities have, and
which do not have, the necessary actionable
knowledge required to reduce youth suicide
rates to zero.
Absent
Present
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Number of Factors Present
What such figures demonstrate is that we, as
social scientists, now know some of what is
required to create a world in which aboriginal
youth can find life worth living. Just as
obviously, communities that have successfully
engineered this considerable accomplishment
also “know,” in some sense, what they are
about, even if, as is likely the case, they were
moved to take the various helpful steps that
they did without any explicit appreciation that
doing so might coincide with achieving a low or
absent suicide rate. In short, while both
researchers, and the communities they serve,
evidently know something of value, it is simply
not clear how deep or declarative this
knowledge actually is.
All of this is perhaps most obvious in the
case of the research community. It is simply an
empirical fact that the aboriginal communities in
BC that have, for example, achieved a measure
of self-government, or were quick off the mark
Chandler & Lalonde: Indigenous Knowledge
to litigate for aboriginal title of traditional lands,
have lower or absent youth suicide rates. What
remains a mystery is how these broad facts of
civic life trickle down into the mental lives of
individual aboriginal youth in such a way that
they end up choosing life over death. Until this
is better understood––a problem that we are
currently working to solve––it will remain
unclear what, if anything, is to be
recommended. Would it be enough (probably
not) to simply urge the same community level
actions on other groups that have been slow or
unwilling to initiate such actions on their own?
Some of our own most recent findings suggest,
for example, that there is now a significant
relation between lower youth suicide rates and
actually having withdrawn in protest from BC’s
treaty process. Clearly, we believe, the various
proxy variables that have served so well to
predict at some frozen moment in time rates of
youth suicide are exactly that—“proxies” that
temporarily stand in lieu of more meaningful
and more enduring community actions that we
do not yet understand.
The largest and least answered question
concerning the especially successful aboriginal
communities that we have studied thus far is
just how “declarative” their obvious procedural
knowledge is. For purposes of internal
consumption, it could be argued (we think
mistakenly) that this scarcely matters. Those
communities that are enjoying especially low
suicide rates could simply soldier on as they
have, for whatever reasons may have moved
them in the past, all in the hopes that changing
circumstances will not undermine their
coincidental successes. Where more
declarative or accessible knowledge is of more
evident and immediate importance is in the
world of knowledge transfer, and in any
possible future attempt to broker an exchange
of best practices. If, as we are currently working
to determine, members of aboriginal
communities with variable rates of success in
addressing the problem of youth suicide are
willing to meet with the aim of being mutually
helpful, then efforts, such as our own, to help
unmask what lies behind already documented
differences in community success rates will
need to be a first step in this knowledge transfer
process.
7
References
Berkhoffer, R. F. (1978). The white man’s Indian. New
York: Vintage.
Chandler, M. J. (2000). Surviving time: The persistence of
identity in this culture and that. Culture and Psychology,
6(2), 209-231.
Chandler, M. J. (2001). The time of our lives: Selfcontinuity in Native and non-Native youth. In H. W.
Reese (Ed.), Advances in child development and
behavior: Vol. 28 (pp. 175-221). New York: Academic
Press.
Chandler, M. J., & Lalonde, C. E. (1998). Cultural
continuity as a hedge against suicide in Canada’s First
Nations. Transcultural Psychiatry, 35(2), 193-211.
Chandler, M. J., & Lalonde, C. E. (2000a). Cross cultural
suicide prevention. Visions: BC’s Mental Health Journal,
11, 11-22.
Chandler, M. J., & Lalonde, C. E. (2000b). Cultural
continuity as a protective factor against suicide in First
Nations youth, Lifenotes, 5(2), 10-11.
Chandler, M. J., Lalonde, C. E., & Sokol, B. (2000).
Continuities of selfhood in the face of radical
developmental and cultural change. In L. Nucci, G. Saxe
& E. Turiel (Eds.), Culture, Thought, and Development
(pp. 65-84). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Chandler, M. J., Lalonde, C. E., Sokol, B., & Hallett, D. (in
press). Personal persistence, identity development, and
suicide: A study of native and non-native North American
adolescents. Monographs of the Society for Research in
Child Development.
Chandler, M. J., & Sokol, B. (2003). Level this, level that:
The place of culture in the construction of the self. In C.
Raeff & J. B. Benson (Eds.), Social and cognitive
development in the context of individual, social, and
cultural processes (pp. 191-216). New York: Taylor &
Francis.
Duran, E., & Duran, B. (1995). Native American
postcolonial psychology. In R. D. Mann (Series Ed.),
SUNY series in transpersonal and humanistic
psychology. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Fanon, F. (1965). A dying colonialism (H. Chevaliar,
Trans.). New York: Grove Press.
Foucault, M. (1980). George Canguilhem: Philosopher of
error. Ideology and Consciousness, 7, 53-54.
Gandhi, L. (1998). Postcolonial theory: A critical
introduction. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hodgkenson, H. L. (1990). The demographics of American
Indians: One percent of the people; fifty percent of the
diversity. Washington, D. C.: Institute for Educational
Leadership, Inc., Center for Demographic Policy.
Kirmayer, L. (1994). Suicide among Canadian aboriginal
people. Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review, 31,
3-57.
Lalonde, C. E. (2003). Counting the costs of failures of
personal and cultural continuity. Human Development,
46, 137-144.
Malchy, B., Enns, M., Young, T., & Cox, B. (1997). Suicide
among Manitoba's aboriginal people, 1988 to 1994.
Canadian Medical Association Journal, 156, 1133-1138.
Nandy, A. (1983). The intimate enemy: Loss and recovery
of self under colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Spivak, G. (1985). Can the subaltern speak?: Speculations
on widow sacrifice. Wedge, 7/8, 120-130.